GIS and Kurosawa / Kurosawa et les SIG

In the movie High and Low – original title “Tengoku to jigoku”- (dir. Akira Kurosawa 1963), the police searches the kidnappers of the son of Gondo, the executive director of a shoe company in Japan (the child of Gondo’s chauffeur was in fact kidnapped by mistake). What’s interesting in this movie in terms of spatial machinery is a specific scene in which the police combines several geographic criteria manually on a map in order to find out the public phone from where the kidnapper regularly calls Gondo. This is the perfect example of a classic site selection exercise that could be part of an introductory GIS course.

The policemen present the results of their researches on a wall map. Their analysis includes the following criteria:

Intervisibility (From which booths can we see the living room of Gondo?) This analysis is rather sophisticated in the context of the movie since it takes into account the vegetation and buildings which is somehow challenging with a GIS;

Distance from which the living room can be seen (they seem to be using a basic buffer zone, but it is not totally clear);

Radiance (Which booths are exposed to the sun at 9:00 am?). This is another rather sophisticated function in GIS because it takes into account the time of the day as well as the season and the orientation of the booth with regard to the surrounding buildings.

The spatial analysis done by these policemen to select the phone booth then requires some advanced GIS functionalities that were not available at the time the movie was released (Note: In 1963 when the film was released, what is usually considered as the first GIS project – the Canada Geographic Information Systems (CGIS) – was just launched, and the analytical functions of GIS appearedfew years later (e.g. the first version of ArcInfo was released in 1981)).

As illustrated by this example, the developement of GIS functionalities has probably been inspired by existing manual practices similar to the one presented in the movie. It can then be argued that the origins of GIS have predated the emergence of computers, as it also appears in other movies such as M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1932). But we will talk about M later on…